Posts Tagged ‘animation’

For those of you using Autodesk Max there is a new plugin at the lab. Autodesk has titled it Geppetto after the puppet maker from Pinocchio lol. I like it. Anyway, the link below has all the information and download links so that you can get started playing with Geppetto.

Oh! I almost forgot.. look for the link in the page below. Autodesk Bought Evolver which is a company that offers parametric character creation.. the good news!! You can download as many as you want for free… create your own itterations.. very awesome! Even if you don’t use Geppetto you’ll love these characters. They are rigged and you can export the mesh, textures, and rigs in many various formats which makes them importable into, not only MAX, but many game engines and software packages. Check it out!

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/geppetto/

Visemes are a concept introduced to me by the guys at Di-o-matic. Visemes are the visual representation of phonemes in lip sync animation. When a character you are making a lip sync track for moves his or her mouth it is oftentimes used to simulate speech.

While there are a large number of phonemes in language there are only a few visemes.

If you are making facial morph targets for your lip sync you actually only need about eleven.

Vowels consist of A, E, and O. And actually U/W can be represented by the same viseme.

Consonants are even easier. B, M, and D can be represented by one viseme. S needs it’s own but C and H can be represented by one viseme.

Then there will be the tongue visemes these consist of L which needs it’s own viseme. T, H, and D can be represented by one viseme. And finally N.

Lastly you have the teeth which only consists of one viseme. F and V.

Hopefully this is helpful to all you lip sync animators. I will possibly be putting some visual representations of these at some point. I’m learning as well so most of my time is spent on modeling and texturing for 3d characters at this point but as my project progresses I should have some nice samples to show.

If you are a local with lip sync animation experience I’d love to hear your thoughts. Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at sumo911@hotmail.com!

Brad